Books published by Shearsman Books

The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2012. Contents will be announced in August 2012.

From Roman tyrants to the persecuted Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, this sequence explores the dark side of our history, and the glories such darkness continues to provoke in art and literature. Between a dusty cellar in Patmos in the 1st century, and the streets of New York on 9/11, the distance can be measured in seconds rather than millennia.

"Jose Kozer is the name of one of contemporary Latin American literature's most consistent and innovative poets, the name at once of a body of work and a particular line of approach." (Adolfo Castanon)

Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms . held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels. - Mervyn Taylor

In 2007, when Didi Menendez, of MiPO publications and miPOradio, invited me to present a monthly series of literary talks, my remit was to be personal, direct and contemporary in the manner of Alistair Cooke's Letters From America. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England began on 7 May 2007, with an essay on aspects of my poetic background.

Readers outside Spain often do not know that the acclaimed novelist, Manuel Rivas is also a significant poet in his homeland, writing from choice in his native Galician. The Disappearance of Snow is a translation of an entire volume which appeared in Spain in 2009, but which, unusually, had the text in all of the country's official languages.

The poems in Noctilucent begin where light exists or is created in darkness, a paradox. But this is not a 'dark / light' of metaphor, but of the real and of relationship, where algae illumines the deep sea, the light of dead stars reach us from deep space, and night is a doorway, an entrance into the interior - of self, other, cosmos.

"With this fine collection Gardner's work achieves what one poem describes as 'beauty itself / taut against the half-life rendering.' Human experience is the shadow cast by these poems, and not the other way around." (G. C. Waldrep)

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem [and] is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human moth. (Irving Weinman)

These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with major figures from the past and poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, Layers of Un marks another stage in the development of Mark Goodwin's radical landscape poetry.

No Names Have Been Changed, Siriol Troup's third collection, offers strong, strange visions. Her poems, assured and varied in technique, are equally at home in ancient cities or on today's derelict coasts. She is a shrewd observer of times and trends: the Afghan coat, the incense-burner...

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, The Wire is a collection of new work by the author of Lion (2010), consisting of the long title sequence and a some shorter poems.

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, this volume marks the first publication by Kit Fryatt.

One of five chapbooks in a new series from Shearsman Books, this volume features the first publication by a young Somerset-based poet, whose work focuses on her home village and its history.

The poems in this book grow out of an extended encounter with the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching or Book of Changes, which is a collection of sixty-four hexagrams comprised of various combinations of broken (yin) and whole (yang) lines.

"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded." (Andrew Duncan)

The poems of Snow look both to the Far East for their ostensible subject matter and back to the UK. Snow is a collection in its own right; its choice and arrangement of poems suggests a terrain richer and more complex than those of individual poems and collections, and one within which they may be rewardingly re-encountered.

Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps.

Kabbalist hymns, a Futurist dragon, Wagnerian vaudeville, Virgil in India, and Pinocchio, in love and at a loss, among the philosophers, are among the mirrors and reflections found in Snake Train, a gathering of the poetic sequences and longer poems (plus one piece of prose) that Edwin Frank has published over the past thirty years.

A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory. The autograph album was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails.

These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s.

More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances - these are the songs that are wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace.

The Voice Thrower is from a batch of long poems begun in the 90s, arising in my "anti poetry" phase. The title should speak for itself, except it doesn't, which is the whole point of being a voice thrower. The poem had a twin, The Submissive Bastards, initially sharing the trope of a red sky at dusk, but TVT's sky turned into a horizon at sea, specifically from Portland looking west across Lyme Bay (Portlanders call it West Bay anyway). While The Voice Thrower's bastard twin became more controlled, TVT grew ever wilder until, while trying to round it off, I began to suspect the poem was an unconscious attempt to engage with the memory of my mother (Hannah Lawton), yet I resisted making this the focus and let the poem mutate again, the original trope of the red horizon (my mother had red hair) spreading rhizome-like through the various scenarios. The irony though was that the more it tried to resist biography the more autobiographical it became. -Tim Allen

Naked Clay is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud - "the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art"' as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences.

This Selected provides an overview of Trevor Joyce's multifaceted poetic career and covers some 45 years of work. The books appears simultaneously with the first major scholarly volume devoted to his work.